(Can ya tell I'm a plant person? whee )

Excerpted from Health and Healing by Andrew Weil, M.D.

Copied by the Sugar Pixie from The Reader's Digest Family Guide to Natural Medicine

A single event in 1803 signaled one of the early milestones in the development of scientific medicine. In that year a young German pharmacist isolated morphine from opium, obtaining for the first time a pure active principle for a crude vegetable drug. This work was valuable and important, both theoretically and practically. It revolutionized medical therapeutics and did indeed put an end to the superstition and uncertainty of herbal treatments. It also created new problems of its own.

In ther enthusiasm at isolating the active principles of drug plants, researchers of the last century made a serious mistake. They came to believe that all of a plant's desirable properties could be accounted for by a single compound, and that it woud always be better to conduct research and treat disease with the purified compoud rather than the whole plant. In this belief, they forgot the plants once they had the activ principles out of them, called all the other principles "inactive", and advance the notion that prescribing refined white powders was more scientific and up-to-date than using crude green plants.

The erroneous idea that plants and isolated active principles are equivalent has become fixed dogma in pharmecology and medicine. ... Nevertheless, I find I have to explain it to physicians and pharmacologists with great patience. Many of them seem to resent the suggestion that natural substances may be better than man-made ones.

All I can say is that I find such a difference, at least in the case of medicinal plants versus isolated drugs. Whenever I have had a chance to experience treatment with a plant and treatment with a refined derivative of the plant, I have found the latter to be more dangerous and sometimes less useful.

(Sorry for any typos, I'm in a little bit of a hurry)

Yay! They're finally catching the drift that Mother Earth knows what she's doing! exclaim